Robert Colvile on Ben Hammersley's 64 Things You Need to Know Now For Then,
which arms us for our digital future.

Ben Hammersley is clearly an accomplished sort of fellow – or at least one with a great many connections. The exhaustive Wikipedia entry of this digital guru-about-town cites his role as editor-at-large of Wired magazine’s UK edition; his status as the Prime Minister’s ambassador to East London Tech City; his membership of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on Media Freedom; his consultancy with the Foreign Office; his memberships and fellowships of this, that and the other; and even his trusteeship of something called the Awesome Foundation.

Judging by his new book, however, all of that is irrelevant. There is only one thing Hammersley and his publishers want you to know about him: that he has a really kick-ass moustache. Indeed, he seems to be so proud of his General Melchett soup-strainer that he has adopted it as his personal logo.

It appears not just on the full-length picture of the author that takes up the entire back cover, but within the text (to provide a break between sections), and even on the front cover, embossed in a fetching shade of brown.

Such a spectacular example of vanity publishing may be a good way to build a brand – but it does little to burnish the author’s credentials as an indispensable guide to the brave new digital future.

Things get worse when it comes to the book’s structure. Subtitled How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear, it is intended to act as a field guide to the internet, and the changes it is bringing to society. Yet the decision to break it into 64 separate essays, chopped about with little rhyme or reason, makes you feel like you’re being bombarded by a bright but hyperactive child.

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Without the time or space to explore each idea fully, Hammersley is forced to flit from topic to topic – with all too many chapter-ettes concluding with an awkward and largely unconvincing segue to the next section.

All of which is a shame, because if you can forgive the shortcomings of the format, there’s some pretty interesting stuff here, especially for those unfamiliar with the latest developments in Silicon Valley.

Hammersley is offering a potted summary of any and every big idea to have captured the technology world’s imagination over the past couple of years, and he certainly knows his stuff.

The appearance of multiple fake Apple stores in China, for example, is the peg for an intriguing essay on why Asia’s shanzai manufacturers – creators of knock-offs called things like Nukia or Blickberry – are actually more innovative and customer-focused than the Western firms they ape.

An exploration of Moore’s Law, which predicted the inexorable increase in computing power in recent years, highlights how politicians and planners will have to think far ahead to cope, since any strategies based on today’s devices will soon be laughably out of date.

Elsewhere, we learn how Nicaragua and Costa Rica almost went to war thanks to an error on Google Maps; how “fractional” artificial intelligence could wake you up 10 minutes early if there are problems on the Victoria line; how terrorists or rogue states could threaten to render the planet uninhabitable via geo-engineering; how more financial trades are being made by computers than humans; or how medicine is being reinvented from the bottom up by the “Quantified Self” movement.

Quite a lot of this is fascinating, and will leave the reader yearning to know more. But overall, the disjointed structure and the breathless rush through all of the topics make this a book to be picked at, rather than devoured.